SSD without TRIM support in MBP's

So it's well known that 10.6 does not have trim support and that 10.7 will. That has not stopped apple and hoards of people from adopting SSD's in MBP their mbp's.

My question is how much of a degradation of performance do you see over time. Also if you were to buy a SSD now, run it w/o trim for months, format + upgrade to lion which has trim support, will it run at 100% like it was brand new out of the box at that time?

From what I understand about SSD and trims that should be the case but I just want to get a second on that.

I have had my MacBook Air since November 2010 and it still benchmarks the same as it did when I got it. Considering that Lion will be out in 6 months or less, I wouldn't worry too much about performance degradation. The newer drives have decent garbage collection, which somewhat compensates for the lack of TRIM support.

My previous MacBook Air (late 2008) did degrade somewhat over two years, but it wasn't exactly a speed demon by SSD standards even when new. Still, it did reboot pretty quickly even at the time I sold it. I didn't try one of the "recondition" programs since I was already getting my new Rev D.

You won't mess it up without TRIM. There have been too many articles (for lack of a better term) freaking consumers out with performance degradation. You literally will have to work to degrade the performance of an SSD to a noticeable amount. You may or may not see differences on benchmarks of course, however real world, even degraded they remain far faster than mechanical drives. Garbage collection has done wonders as well, so basically just using a quality SSD you'll be just fine, TRIM or not.

Right, but bottom line, if you were to do a full reformat and an install of Lion, it should return back to 100% right?

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Not exactly. You'd have to do a secure erase through either a utility in Windows, or Terminal in any distro of Linux. I wouldn't worry about performance degradation, though, to be honest. Unless you constantly have your SSD full (which is bad for regular HDDs too, by the way), you won't ever notice any slowdown, except for MASSIVE file transfers, and even that won't show up for months or years, depending on how you use your computer.

Trim support is essential for windows. Compare to windows, linux and mac osx has way better garbage collecting algorithm. Don't worry about the slow down. I doubt anyone will notice any speed difference without any special tool.
I been using my vertex 2 SSD in my macbook for almost a year already, and I don't notice any slow down (I download and delete big chunk stuff very frequently weekly), my macbook can still boot to desktop in 17 sec and open up office powerpoint or xcode like seconds.

I've had an OCZ Vertex 2 for about 8 months now. I've noticed no slow down at all. I actually timed my bootup and applications with the new air and beat it in every test. No, this isn't a scientific test, but its still faster then the airs SSD even after 8 months of use.

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